Dietrich Jung

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
and Niklas Luhmann:
Boundary Negotiations Between
Religion and Science in the Abbasid Empire

Working Paper #26

Working Paper Series of the Centre for Advanced Studies
in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CASHSS)“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”
ISSN 2700-5518#26: Dietrich Jung. “Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Niklas Luhmann: Boundary
Negotiations Between Religion and Science in the Abbasid Empire.” Leipzig
University, 2022.
© Dietrich Jung
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publication in any other venue. Copyright remains with the authors.
Please cite as:Jung, Dietrich. “Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Niklas Luhmann: Boundary Negotiations
Between Religion and Science in the Abbasid Empire.” Working Paper Series of the
CASHSS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 26. Leipzig
University, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36730/2020.1.msbwbm.26

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Contents

1
2
3
4
5

Introduction: From Academic Celebrity to Religious Seclusion........................ 3
Modern Systems Theory: Modernisation as Functional Differentiation............ 7
Emergence: Modernity Without an Origin in Time and Space................................ 11
Al-Ghazali: Deliverance from Error........................................................................ 14
The Golden Age of Islamic Science: Ghazali and the Scholarly Environmentof Baghdad................................................................................................................. 18
6 Conclusions: Lessons to Learn from Luhmann and Ghazali............................. 21
7 Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 261

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Niklas Luhmann:
Boundary Negotiations Between Religion andScience in the Abbasid Empire
1 Introduction: From Academic Celebrity to Religious Seclusion

In November 1095, the eminent Islamic religious scholar Abu Hamid alGhazali (1058–1111) left the Abbasid capital Baghdad for a journey thatwas long in both geographical and mental terms. Biographers of Ghazalirefer to this part of his life as a period of seclusion.1 Over the course of two
years, he travelled to Damascus, Hebron, Jerusalem, and to the holy cities
of Mecca and Medina in the Hejaz, before briefly returning to Baghdad in
1097. After this, Ghazali spent the rest of his life teaching and writing in
isolation in Tus and Nishapur, in his home region of Khorasan, in what
is today Iran. One of his biographers, Eric Ormsby, describes Ghazali
as a “religious genius,” whose work was characterised by a “distinctive
originality.”2 Without a doubt, Ghazali is one of the most significant
thinkers in the history of Islamic ideas. He originally came to Baghdad
from Isfahan in July 1091, taking up the prestigious position of professor
at the Nizamiyya Madrasa, a leading Islamic institute of higher learning of
the Abbasid Empire.3 He was appointed by Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092),
the Grand Vizier of the Seljuq Sultan, who exerted de facto political control
over the Abbasid Caliphate until his assassination.4 While a professor at
the Nizamiyya, Ghazali frequented the courts of both the Caliphate and

1

2
3

4

The precise dates of Ghazali’s birth and death are somewhat unclear, and are
disputed in the literature. For a discussion of his biographical details, see theintroduction to Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
Eric Ormsby, Ghazali: The Revival of Islam (Oxford: One World, 2008).
The institution of the madrasa has changed in character over time, and should
not be conflated with the modern concept of a university. Generally speaking, it
combined a mosque with a school – often a boarding school for students who
were primarily engaged in learning the classical Islamic sciences: jurisprudence,theology, Quranic interpretation, and knowledge of the traditions. Increasingly,
however, some of them also engaged with the ‘empirical sciences’ of their times.
For a study on the institution of the madrasa in Islamic history, see Ebrahim
Moosa, What is a Madrasa? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, 34.
3

of the Sultanate, maintaining close contact with the Caliph, the Sultan and
the Grand Vizier.5 During his years in Baghdad, he enjoyed a degree ofacademic celebrity and the highest level of political protection. Why, then,did he leave this comfortable position and withdraw from the world?
In his autobiographical work Deliverance from Error, Ghazali tells us
about the crisis that eventually caused him to leave Baghdad – a “crisis ofindecision,” which began in July 1095. At its core was Ghazali’s internal
debate over whether he should give up his glamorous teaching position toinstead follow a spiritual religious path. This mental crisis expressed itself
in severe health problems, culminating in his losing the ability to speak,
and being hardly able to swallow and therefore to adequately nourish
himself.6 The subsequent period of seclusion was chosen as a remedy tothis crisis.7 In academic literature, there are ongoing disagreements about
the real motivation behind Ghazali writing Deliverance from Error. For
some, this text represents the sincere confession of a religious wanderer on
his path to spiritual fulfilment.8 For others, Ghazali’s autobiography is theself-justification of an intellectual elitist.9 These scholarly disagreements areirrelevant to this essay, however. I do not intend to provide a new answer tothis debate, and my paper does not aim to make any direct contribution to
the study of the life and work of Ghazali.
In the context of my involvement with the CASHSS10 Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’ research programme,

Ghazali came to Baghdad under the protection of Nizam al-Mulk, who wasalso born in Tus. Nizam al-Mulk became known for founding a number ofmadrasas, a new form of educational structure. Albert Hourani, Die Geschichte
der arabischen Völker (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 192.
6 Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, 42.
7 Albert Hourani points out that Deliverance from Error is not a classic
autobiography, but rather the description of the supposed transformation in
Ghazali’s thought. Hourani, Die Geschichte, 217.
8 Richard J. McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translationof Al-Ghazali’s Al-Munqidh Min Al-Dalal and Other Relevant Works of AlGhazali (Woodbridge: Twayne Publishers, 1980); Duncan B. MacDonald,“The Life of al-Ghazzali with Especial Reference to His Religious Experiences
and Opinions,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 20 (1899): 71–132.
9 Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives (London: Thames andHudson, 2016).
10 Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Leipzig
University, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
54

I chose Ghazali’s autobiography, and in particular his “crisis of indecision,”as an example of a pre-modern negotiation of the boundaries of religion at
the micro level. The research programme suggests employing the analyticalconcept of secularity to investigate both non-Western and pre-modern
forms of secularity, in terms of conceptual distinctions and institutional
differentiations between religious and non-religious social spheres.11 In thisessay, I would like to propose a method of pursuing these goals from my
own theoretical perspective. More specifically, I will argue that in Ghazali’s
reflections on spiritual religiosity, theology, philosophy and science, we candiscern the individual engagement of a prominent Muslim thinker withemerging communicative realms. In the Modern Systems Theory of Niklas
Luhmann, these realms are taken to represent functionally differentiatedsubsystems of modern society.
Of course, Ghazali was not a modern thinker, and in this regard myanalysis is utterly anachronistic. This anachronism is intentional, however,as I will be applying theories of emergence. Theories of social emergencedeal with the rise of new levels of social reality, without locating a fixed
origin in time or space. Therefore, I will deliberately try not ‘to avoid
anachronisms,’ instead using them as a means in a heuristic research
process.12 The search for the emergence of modern boundary negotiationin the Abbasid Empire ties in with the desire to deprivilege Europe in our
understanding of the global rise of modernity. Even more importantly,
it forms part of an attempt to strip away the hegemonic and Eurocentricpresuppositions that locate the historical origin of modernity in Europe.
In this way, the aim of my essay is first and foremost to make a theoreticalcontribution to the research programme on Multiple Secularities. With myargument here, I seek to support the claim that we can observe processesof social differentiation between religious and non-religious spheres “innon-Western, early and premodern contexts.”13 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
11 Christoph Kleine, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Preliminary Findings andOutlook of the CASHSS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities’,” Working Paper Series of the CASHSS “Multiple Secularities –Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 22, Leipzig University, 2020, 3.
12 Cf. Kleine, and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Preliminary Findings,” 16.
13 Markus Dressler, Armando Salvatore, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Islamicate
Secularities: New Perspectives on a Contested Concept,” Historische
Sozialforschung 44, no. 3 (2019): 10.
5

wrote his Deliverance from Error at a time in which the power of the Islamic
empires was superior to that of European actors. The impact of Europe on
Ghazali is, if at all, only traceable in his reading of Platonic and Aristotelianphilosophy and the thoughts of the Greek physician Galen.14 As such, thiscase study analyses developments in the Islamic history of ideas long before
European colonial influence, and thus before the concomitant ‘importation’of modern European social thoughts and institutions. In interpreting
Ghazali’s autobiography through the lens of Luhmann’s Modern Systems
Theory, however, I do not claim to be making a contribution to theongoing research on the life of this outstanding Muslim scholar, as I lackthe necessary scholarly expertise in this field. Instead, I use the example ofthis pre-modern Islamic thinker as a means of illustrating my theoreticalargument about the emergent nature of global modernity. His life andwork provide suitable material for the search for traces of elements offunctional differentiation, in terms of non-teleological evolutionary and –in Luhmann’s terms – first preadaptive advancements of modern society. I
look at the historically contingent emergence of social patterns, which we,in retrospect, could designate as indigenous first moves in the direction ofmodern social differentiation.
I will outline my argument in five stages. Following this introduction,
I will briefly sketch out my general theoretical framework.15 This is based
firstly on Luhmann’s concept of modern society, whilst secondarily also being
anchored in the metatheoretical context of socio-cultural evolution, with its
related concept of social emergence. These two theoretical perspectives will
guide my observations of social boundary demarcations on the micro level.
In a third step, I will conduct a brief analysis of Ghazali’s autobiographical

14 Greek philosophy reached Ghazali mainly through the readings of Islamic
philosophers such as Kindi (870), Farabi (872), and Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 1037).
The very same philosophers who were later subject to his staunch critique. Bernd
Radtke, “Der sunnitische Islam,” in Der Islam in der Gegenwart, ed. WernerEnde, and Udo Steinbach (München: C.H. Beck, 1989), 62. See also Kenneth
Garden, The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the
Religious Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
15 I presented my approach to a global sociology of modernity as illustrated by Islamic
history in more detail in two books: Dietrich Jung, Muslim History and Social Theory:
A Global Sociology of Modernity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); andDietrich Jung, Der Islam in der globalen Moderne: Soziologische Theorie und die
Vielfalt islamischer Modernitäten (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2021).
6

text, and its implicit discussion of religious and non-religious spheres. In
this analysis, I refer to the English translation of Ghazali’s Arabic text by
Richard McCarthy.16 The subsequent section discusses my findings in lightof the development of science as a subsystem of modern society. Historically,
Ghazali played a key role in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic science,
which I understand as an intrinsic part of the rise of modern science. Finally,
I draw some conclusions with respect to more general questions from the
CASHSS Multiple Secularities’ research programme.
2 Modern Systems Theory: Modernisation as Functional Differentiation

The theoretical ideas of Niklas Luhmann follow the sociological tradition oftheories of differentiation from Emile Durkheim to Talcott Parsons. In thissense, his theoretical edifice matches with the CASHSS’ research programme’s“plea for a differentiation-theoretical perspective.”17 However, in combining
theories of functional differentiation with those of self-reference and thehermeneutical tradition in German philosophy, Luhmann differs from thesociological mainstream tradition in a decisive way. He did not understanddifferentiation as a kind of decomposition of a social whole. Instead, he applieddifferentiation theory from the perspective of social emergence.18 In Luhmann’s
theory, the socio-cultural evolution of a modern plurality of social realms is
no longer explained in terms of the functional demands of a social whole.19
16 McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment. I am well aware that using a translationof the text runs the risk of implementing an additional layer of anachronistic
use of terms and concepts. However, not being an expert on medieval Arabic
literature my own translations would be far worse.
17 Christoph Kleine, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Preliminary Findings andOutlook of the CASHSS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities’,” Working Paper Series of the CASHSS “Multiple Secularities –Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 22, Leipzig University, 2020, 8.
18 Whether we can indeed describe Luhmann’s Modern Systems Theory by
the term social emergence, however, is somehow disputed, see: Dave ElderVass, “Luhmann and Emergentism: Competing Paradigms for Social Systems
Theory?,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37, no. 4 (2007); Bettina Heintz,“Emergenz und Reduktion: Neue Perspektiven auf das Mikro-MakroProblem,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 56, no.
1 (2004); Simon Lohse, “Zur Emergenz des Sozialen bei Niklas Luhmann,”Zeitschrift für Soziologie 40, no. 3 (2011); Poe Yu-Ze Wan, “Emergence à laSystems Theory: Epistemological Totalausschluss or Ontological Novelty?,”
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 41, no. 2 (2011).
19 Uwe Schimank, Differenzierung und Integration der modernen Gesellschaft.
7

The systemic subdivision of modern society into autonomous functional
systems such as arts, economics, law, politics, religion and science is the resultof the contingent evolution of modern society as an all-encompassing global
system of communications. Therefore, it is possible to ascribe functional
equivalents to each modern subsystem.
Modern society in this construction is, therefore, not a corporate actor
constituted by its single parts. The properties of its parts are different from the‘whole.’ Consequently, there can be no system that can claim representationof society as a whole. The subsystems of modern society operate according totheir own communicative codes, which have established themselves throughprocesses of operational closure. While these “autopoietic” social systems
need inputs from their environments, they transform these inputs into
specific elements of their own particular and self-referential communicative
logic.20 Designating the social realms of modern society in this way, Luhmann
was following a very rigid form of self-reference whose ontological quality
is questionable. I am not going to discuss this problem further here, butinstead use his theory to facilitate my observations in a heuristic sense.21 In
my analysis of Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error, I will focus on the boundary
demarcation between religion and science. In what ways did Luhmanndefine the communicative codes of these two social subsystems? How does
Luhmann conceptualise secularisation?
For Niklas Luhmann, secularisation is synonymous with the emergenceof functional differentiation as the dominant modus of differentiationin modern society.22 The concept of secularity applied by the Multiple
Secularities research programme describes religion’s societal environment,
in which religion takes the position of an observer. Consequently, basedon its own communicative code, religion observes the world as becoming
Beiträge zur akteurszentrierten Differenzierungstheorie 1 (Wiesbaden: VS
Verlag, 2005), 44–47.
20 Luhmann comprehensively presented his theoretical approach for the firsttime in Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). He later
published his Modern Systems Theory in a revised form in the two volumes
Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998).
21 I discuss questions about Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems in: DietrichJung, Der Islam in der globalen Moderne: Soziologische Theorie und die
Vielfalt islamischer Modernitäten (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2021).
22 Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2002), 126.
8

non-religious or secular.23 The discourse around secularisation, then, isthe engagement of religion with the increasing autonomisation of nonreligious social domains such as the arts, economics, law, politics, or science.
Luhmann makes the heuristic assumption that, historically, religion was
the first modern communicative system to become differentiated throughits operational closure with respect to other emerging social systems.24
Religious communication looks at worldly affairs in terms of the binary
code between transcendence and immanence.25 Luhmann rejects previous
functionalist theories, according to which religion plays an essential role in
the integration of society. In his eyes, modern religion is not characterised bya loss of function, instead taking on its modern contours and its particularfunction due to its operational closure as a self-referential system of
religious communications.26 The concept of religion thus refers to a clearly
identifiable functional subsystem of modern society, which has gained its
relative autonomy through a specifically religious code of communication.
In Religions in Global Society, the Canadian sociologist Peter Beyer builds
on this basic assumption by Luhmann. According to Beyer, religious
communication is based on binary codes such as transcendent/immanent,sacred/profane or blessed/cursed.27 In a process of global entanglement,
religious communication identified a number of sets of authoritative
traditions as mutually acknowledged religions. These “religious programs,”
in Beyer’s terminology, appear as specific belief systems, based on textual,
symbolic and ritual sources, forming a global system of ‘world religions’such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.
According to Luhmann, the modern system of science is theevolutionary product of a second-order observation, rendering possible
the distinction between true and untrue knowledge.28 We can observe

23 Luhmann, 282–89.
24 Werner L. Schneider, “Religion und funktionale Differenzierung,” in Soziale
Differenzierung: Handlungstheoretische Zugänge in der Diskussion, ed.
Thomas Schwinn, Christoph Kronenberg, and Jens Greve (Wiesbaden: VS
Verlag, 2011), 181–209, see esp. 205.
25 Luhmann, Religion, 77.
26 Luhmann, 122–44.
27 Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (London: Routledge, 2006), 85.
28 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1992), 170.
9

this evolutionary process with respect to religion, in the differentiation
between revealed knowledge and scientific knowledge, i.e. between
faith and truth. With its code, true/untrue scientific communication
creates permanent uncertainty, only compensated for by the constantdevelopment of new methods.29 Scientific theories and methods represent
different programmes for coping with the contingency that the system
of science itself produces. Through the differentiation of disciplines andprogrammes, scientific communication secures its operational closure andongoing reproduction, against the background of the contingent natureof modern knowledge.30 As subsystems of science, academic disciplines
follow a structure of horizontal differentiation, and are oriented toward
internal scientific problems.31 Consequently, scientific observations aresecond-order observations, and science may be said to be communicative
construction, rather than discovery.32 In the nineteenth century, forexample, we can observe intense boundary negotiations between religion
and science. In Europe, new philological methods and the critical readingof the Bible impacted strongly on these negotiations, contributing to boththe separation between belief and truth, and to the ‘scientification ofreligion.’ That is to say, they supported the formulation of religious studies
as a discipline of the developing humanities and social sciences.33
Luhmann’s theoretical perspective is highly suited to the study ofsecularities on the macro level. Modern Systems Theory provides a generic
29 Luhmann, 325.
30 Luhmann, 428.
31 Luhmann, 451.
32 Luhmann, 714.
33 Kocku von Stuckrad, The Scientification of Religion: A Historical Study of
Discursive Change (1800-2000) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). I elaborate on thisprocess of the “scientification” of religion in an article that analyses the life
and work of the British theologian and orientalist William Robertson Smith(1846–1894): Dietrich Jung, “Sociology, Protestant Theology, and the Conceptof Modern Religion: William Robertson Smith and the ‘Scientification’of Religion,” Journal of Religion in Europe 8 (2015). Equally, in my book
Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere (Sheffield: Equinox,2011), I analyse the life and work of a number of sociologists and orientalists
involved in this process, who reacted to these boundary negotiations in very
different ways. For instance, while Robertson Smith applied philologicalmethods to prove revealed truth in the New Testament, the confrontation withthe same scientific tools led Ernest Renan to give up his theological studies
and become agnostic.
10

concept of modernity, in which secularisation appears as the gradualreplacement of previously dominant means of differentiation such as
segmentation, stratification and centre–periphery relations by functional
differentiation.34 That I take my inspiration from Luhmann’s highly abstract
theory, however, does not necessarily imply my endorsement of all of his
basic theoretical assumptions, including his rigid understanding of modern
society’s subsystems as self-referential, “autopoietic” social systems, andhis relegation of social actors to the environment of the social realm.35 As
already mentioned, I consider these propositions to have a heuristic rather
than an ontological value. Ghazali’s process of boundary demarcation
between religion and science shows that the historical evolution offunctional differentiation involved individual as well as collective social
actors. While borrowing from Luhmann in defining modernity on themacro level, I nonetheless consider the social actors of the micro level to beindispensable parts of social reality. Religion and science have only achieved
their historical significance by being collectively recognised interpretative
structures of reality. Social actors apply functionally differentiated meansof communication in terms of “situation-specific fictions,”36 i.e. social
subsystems represent for them a demarcation of meaning. How, then, canwe understand the relationship between these different levels of social
reality? I would argue that the meta-theoretical paradigm of emergence
provides a good answer to this question.
3 Emergence: Modernity Without an Origin in Time and Space

Theories of emergence have their origins in nineteenth-century Britain, andmoved to the centre of scientific discussions following the First World War.
Proponents of the theories argued against both dualistic and reductionist
theories of science – that is to say, they rejected the vitalistic dualism
between matter and mind, as well as the reduction of the properties of
the whole to those of its parts. Consequently, these two core assumptions
characterise the paradigm of emergence: Firstly, the properties of different

34 Niklas Luhmann, “Geschichte als Prozess und die Theorie sozio-kultureller
Evolution,” in Soziologische Aufklärung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,1981), 3:187.
35 Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 288.
36 Schimanck, Differenzierung und Integration, 48.
11

levels of reality do not result from binaries of substances such as mind andmatter. Secondly, we should not reduce the properties of a higher levelto those of a lower level of reality, i.e. mental structures to mere material
processes.37 We face questions of emergence in diverse complex systems suchas ant colonies, neural networks, the immune system, or global financial
markets.38 In all these cases, the concept of emergence describes complex andadaptive systems, and reflects upon the relationship between different levelsof reality. Theories of emergence describe structures of reality with reference
to different levels with different properties which cannot be reduced to
one another.39 Regarding social emergence, we can roughly distinguishthree ontological and epistemological levels: the macro, meso and microlevels of society. While functional systems describe the social macro level,organisations, institutions and social movements appear on the meso level.
My example of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s life and work, then, is situated on the
micro level of a historical individual. These three levels together represent
social reality as a whole, and are connected through a kind of “constitutive
interdependence.”40 It is this constitutive interdependence that becomesvisible in boundary negotiations such as those between religion and science.
It is collective and individual actors who draw the historically contingent but
temporarily valid boundaries of different social realms.
By adding the metatheoretical concept of emergence to my own
theoretical framework, I draw undogmatically from what has been termed‘strong emergence.’ According to this concept, some properties of a system
are irreducible to – and unpredictable in their origin from – the behaviourof its constituent parts. Consequently, these properties are novel andgenuine results of socio-cultural evolution.41 Thinking of modernity in

37 Achim Stephan, “Eine kurze Einführung in die Vielfalt und Geschichte
emergentistischen Denkens,” in Blinde Emergenz? Interdisziplinäre Beiträge
zu Fragen kultureller Evolution (Heidelberg: Synchron, Wissenschaftsverlag
der Autoren, 2000), 34.
38 John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 2.
39 Charbel N. El-Hani, and Sami Philström, “Emergence Theories and PragmaticRealism,” Essays in Philosophy 3, no. 1, Article 3 (2002): 5.
40 Dan Zahavi, “On Self, Empathy, and Shame,” International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 23, no. 5 (2015): 638–44.
41 Achim Stephan, “Varieties of Emergentism,” Evolution and Cognition 5, no. 1(1999): 51–53.
12terms of social emergence allows us to come to a multilevel descriptionof the social world. From this perspective, the communicational codes offunctional differentiation are the historically contingent and unexpected
result of socio-cultural evolution. In this respect, socio-cultural evolution
is understood in terms of contingent variation, selection, and emerging
forms of self-organisation at lower levels.42 Even if we attributed
ontological priority to the individual level, as is the case in methodologicalindividualism, society and its subsystems have specific properties distinct
from those of human individuals. Both social systems and individual actors
are autonomous but interdependent levels of social reality.43 Disputes inthe social sciences between theories of individualism and structuralism,
therefore, should be seen as methodological in nature, rather than a matterof the ontological status of social reality.44
Adopting this perspective of social emergence, I explore Luhmann’s
description of functionally differentiated modern global society as asocial macro level with novel properties, albeit one originally generated byprocesses and activities at lower levels. This constitutive interdependenceof the macro, meso and micro levels of social reality does not contradict theclaim that social structures at a higher level possess relative autonomy once
they have been established. In defining social systems as autopoietic, Niklas
Luhmann may exaggerate the self-referentiality of the novel properties ofmodern functional systems. Yet, when interpreting the operational closureof social systems in terms of conceptual ideal types, I do not see any
problem in combining concepts of Modern Systems Theory with theories
that prioritise other levels of social reality or emphasise forms of discursive
and social interaction. Whether we start from structures, organisations, orthe individual is a question of our choice of research strategy, rather than
one stemming from rigid application of methodological principles.
Putting Luhmann into a framework of emergence provides mewith a theoretical perspective according to which the rise of functional
differentiation has no specific origin in time and space. Similar to the

42 Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in
Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
43 Schimanck, Differenzierung und Integration, 73.
44 Cf. Keith R. Sawyer, “Nonreductive Individualism: Part I – Supervenience andWild Disjunction,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32, no. 4 (2002): 537.
13development of new ways of thinking described in the “axial age” thesisof the German philosopher Carl Jaspers, we can understand the rise offeatures of modernity at different places and points in time within a long
historical period. According to Jaspers’ philosophical speculation, theaxial age (700–200 B.C.) is characterised by a fundamental transformation
brought about by the communicative construction of a transcendental
realm in permanent tension with the world. The core of Jaspers’ thesis isthat, across different cultures, we observe the independent but simultaneous
emergence of two realms of reality, dividing the world into transcendental
and mundane spaces.45 From Jaspers’ philosophical perspective, these
two social spheres appeared in different cultural settings that were not in
contact with each other. The world-historical patterns of transcendence
and immanence are the evolutionary result of contingent but, in retrospect,directed human developments. In the following section, therefore, I will
look at Ghazali’s autobiographical reflections as an example of the premodern independent emergence of realms of communication, which wetoday identify with the social systems of science and religion. Throughthe metatheoretical paradigm of emergence, I will facilitate an encounter
between Niklas Luhmann and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
4 Al-Ghazali: Deliverance from Error

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali wrote his Deliverance from Error shortly before
his death in 1111, more than 10 years after he left his teaching positionin Baghdad. The deep crisis in his personal life, and the resulting
transformation in his thinking, are the core themes of this autobiographicalwork. In the book, Ghazali identifies four groups that occupy themselveswith the search for truth: theologians, representatives of the Batiniyya
sect,46 philosophers, and mystics. In the end, Ghazali concludes that

45 Carl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1956). In sociology, Jasper’s speculative philosophical conceptof the axial age has been incorporated into so-called civilisational theories;
see Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental
Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European Journal of Sociology 23 no. 2(1982); and Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions
and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
46 The Batiniyya emphasised the internal interpretation of the holy scripturesof Islam instead of their literal understanding. Their teachings contained
14

only the intuition of the mystic arrives at real truth; neither empiricalknowledge through the senses, nor the rational reasoning of philosophy,
will lead to the same end. In this way, Ghazali describes his own path
to real knowledge as the transformation from a rationalist thinking inphilosophical categories, to a Sufi following a mystical path.47 Following
the philosophers in constructing truth from first principles, according toGhazali, leads to unauthorised innovations (bida´) without roots in theIslamic traditions.48
The central question of Deliverance from Error is that of what
constitutes true knowledge. In applying the categories of Modern Systems
Theory, I read it as a treatise on the relationship between revealed andscientific knowledge, and between the two emerging communicative
systems of religion and science. Ghazali begins by describing how he lost
confidence in empirical experiments and observations, moving on insteadto the search for knowledge from first principles, which he considered
to be philosophical ideas in a Platonic sense.49 In this first shift, Ghazali
rejected empiricist methods and took up the path of Neoplatonic thought,with which he had made himself familiar through his reading of Muslim
philosophers such as Al-Farabi (around 872–950) and Ibn Sina (lat.
Avicenna, 980–1037).50 According to my anachronistic reading, Ghazali isreflecting upon methods of empirical knowledge, as early as the eleventh
century. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such
reflections would become the new modern scientific standard in Europe.51

Neoplatonic and dualistic Iranian elements, and are closely linked to
the Ismailiyya, an offspring of Shiism, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, s.v.
“Batiniyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam online, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden:
Brill, 2012); and the classic: Ignaz Goldziher, Streitschrift des Ghazali gegen
die Batinija-Sekte (Leiden: Brill, 1916).
47 Montgomery W. Watt, s.v. “Al-Ghazali,” In Encyclopaedia of Islam online.
48 Hourani, Die Geschichte, 218.
49 Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error: Five Key Texts Including his
Spiritual Autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, trans. Richard J. McCarthy(Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1980), 58.
50 Alphousseyni Cissé, Quelques aspects de la pensée d’Al-Gazali (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2013); D. C. Moulder “The First Crisis in the Life of Al-Ghazali.”Islamic Studies 11, no. 2 (1972); Montgomery W. Watt, “Al-Ghazali”.
51 Cf. Bettina Heintz, and Tobias Werron, “Wie ist Globalisierung möglich? Zur
Entstehung globaler Vergleichshorizonte am Beispiel von Wissenschaft undSport,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 56 (2011): 1–31.
15

Following his discussion of empiricism versus rationalism, Ghazali moves
on to define the four aforementioned groups of seekers of knowledge. His
comparison of these four ideal types is guided by the assumption that oneof them should reveal the correct path to true knowledge, in the sense oftranshistorically valid perennial knowledge.
Ghazali examines the four types one by one, beginning with thetheologians. Theology (ilm al-kalām), according to Ghazali, cannot be thereal source of truth, as most theologians only try to defend their orthodox
beliefs against heretics.52 Consequently, they try to maintain the statusquo, rather than engaging in the search for real knowledge. Thus, they
are rapidly excluded as a possible source of truth. More complex is his
relationship with the philosophers. While he insists on the necessity of aproper understanding of philosophy, he eventually rejects the rationalist
path to knowledge. In his analysis of the philosophers, Ghazali distinguishes
between materialists, naturalists, and theists, and examines the six
philosophical sciences: mathematics, logic, natural sciences, theology,
politics, and ethics.53 Applying Luhmann’s Modern Systems Theory, we cansay that Ghazali applied subdivisions associated with different disciplinesof the modern system of science. In referring to this differentiation of thephilosophical sciences, Ghazali rejects the assumption that a sincere Muslim
believer must defend Islam against scientific findings. In his opinion, such a
position would certainly be proof of a strong loyalty to Islam, but it is at thesame time a proof based on ignorance.54 In sharp contrast, he mentions thebenefits of using logic as a method of argumentation in Islamic theology
and jurisprudence (fiqh).55 In Ghazali’s eyes, there is no religious reason to
reject the findings of medicine and the natural sciences. More significantly,
he does not consider them to play a role in the justification of religious
belief either. Ghazali ultimately finds the secure path to religious truth tolie solely in the mystical practices and experiences of Sufism, which for
him have contributed to the “purification of his soul.” Through spiritualexperience on the path of Sufism, the believer approaches the real nature of
divine revelation conveyed by Muhammad, the messenger of God.
52 Ghazali, Deliverance, 59.
53 Ghazali, 63.
54 Ghazali, 64.
55 Ghazali, 65.
16

Applying Luhmann’s conceptual terms as my language of observation,
I identify different forms of communication in Ghazali’s writings. In his
effort to justify seeking religious truth through the spiritual experience ofGod, Ghazali leads his readers through various subdivisions of scientificand religious communications. Viewing his writing through this lens, we
see that he distinguishes between religion and science close to the way inwhich we separate them in modern times. Ghazali’s discussion covers both
metaphysical and empirical forms of knowledge. In addition, his thoughts
show a certain awareness of emerging subdivisions in the system of science,and of the role theology plays in otherwise empirical scientific disciplines.
Yet, in his critique of the theologists, he also draws the boundaries by which
theological reasoning, such as kalām, could be authorised.56 In Deliverance
from Error, we detect Ghazali’s struggle with various forms of truth. In theconceptual language of Niklas Luhmann, these forms of truth represent
preliminary stages in the rise of the modern communicative media – belief
and scientific truth. In this reading, Ghazali engaged in the demarcationof the discursive boundaries of two social subsystems. Based on theseobservations, I tentatively pose the interpretative claim that, as early as theeleventh century, Ghazali was dealing with the intrinsic communicative
logic of emerging modern social systems. From his religious point of view,
however, he did not accept the equal and independent coexistence of these
discursive truths. His discussion of the different forms of communication
served him in the confirmation of the primacy of religion. Ghazali
understood the order of things to be solely in the hands of God,57 rejecting
what could today be described as the ‘polycontexturality of modernity.’ He
held that it was the task of religious scholars to defend the undisputableprimacy of religion, lest ordinary Muslims come to the point of disregarding
the hierarchy of knowledge. Consequently, despite their useful insights, hesees a risk of science and philosophy undermining religion. In this way,
Ghazali’s motivation in writing Deliverance from Error may indeed havebeen to provide a “spiritual guide for ordinary Muslims.”58

56 Cf. Hourani, Die Geschichte, 217.
57 MacDonald, “The Life of al-Ghazzali,” 115.
58 Avital Wohlman, Al-Ghazali, Averroes and the Interpretation of the Qur´an:
Common Sense and Philosophy in Islam (London: Routledge, 2009), 4.
17

5 The Golden Age of Islamic Science: Ghazali and the Scholarly
Environment of Baghdad

We must read the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in the historical anddiscursive context of the so-called Golden Age of Islamic science, whichconventionally has been related to the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258).
More precisely, Ghazali’s thought was intimately connected to the urban
intellectual culture of the Abbasid capital Baghdad (from 762). As thecentre of Islamic science, Baghdad had a large infrastructure of academies
and libraries, as well as research and teaching institutions, and by the eighth
century its population had already exceeded two million inhabitants.59
Over centuries, discussion of controversial theological, philosophical, andscientific questions was fostered in the intellectual milieu of Baghdad.60
During this period, books from Greece, Persia and India were translated
into Arabic, which, as a result, replaced Greek as the universal languageof scientific inquiry. In addition, since the early ninth century, major
Islamic cities had had organised forms of higher education, featuring
varieties of pre-modern institutions, such as the Nizamiyya.61 Muslim
and non-Muslim scholars produced astronomical, historiographical,
geographical, and theological literature in Arabic, alongside handbooks
on administrative and political affairs.62 Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error
should therefore be seen not only as an account of his personal crisis, butalso as an engagement with the intellectual controversies of the Golden
Age. The individual perceptions of Ghazali only make sense in the context
of Baghdad’s discursive and institutional structures at the meso level.
Advancements in early modern science, medicine, and technology
characterised the scholarly environment in which Ghazali was raised.
George Saliba emphasises the revolutionary role of “Islamic sciences” andthe field of astronomy in particular.63 The classical narrative of Islamic

59 Maurice Lombard, Blütezeit des Islam: Eine Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte
des 8. – 11. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 129.
60 Sebastian Günther, “Bildung und Ethik im Islam,” in Islam: Einheit und Vielfalt
einer Weltreligion, ed. Rainer Brunner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2016), 214.
61 Jonathan Lyons. The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western
Civilization (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 64.
62 Hourani, Die Geschichte, 252–55.
63 George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18

sciences – moving from a focus on the translation of outside works, to
its own Golden Age, to its eventual decline and stagnation – represents
a rather Eurocentric understanding of the rise of the modern system ofscience. It is an understanding that has lost much of its credibility.64 In
Saliba’s analysis, the production of scientific knowledge did not face an
immediate decline with the fall of Abbasid rule, nor did Muslim scholarshiprepresent a mere intermediate period in the translation and transmission of
Greek knowledge to Europe. With their innovative scientific achievements,
Islamic scholars contributed to the development of the global system ofscience more generally. In fact, the so-called modern scientific revolution
in Europe cannot be separated from its complex entanglement with Asian,Greek, and Islamic cultures of knowledge.65 A telling case in point concerns
the Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), who lived and worked in
Cairo and Damascus. In his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna’s Canon,
Ibn al-Nafis fundamentally revised the Galen scheme with respect to thepulmonary circulation of the blood. In his Commentary, Ibn al-Nafis
described how “blood has to pass through the pulmonary circulation andcould not move directly from the right to the left ventricle” of the heart,around 300 years before European scholars came to the same conclusion.66
While in the period after Ghazali’s death the relatively open reception anddiscussion of philosophical and scientific knowledge came under pressure,scientific thinking never stagnated in the Islamic regions of the world. This
also applies to the sciences in the Ottoman Empire. The classic narrative
about the Ottoman realm lacking a scientific history has increasingly beenrevised in recent decades.67
To a certain extent, the intellectual environment that Hamid Abu alGhazali enjoyed in Abbasid Baghdad foreshadowed the polycontextural

64 Cf. Ahmed Ragab, “Making History: Identity, Progress and the ModernScience Archive,” Journal of Early Modern History 21, no. 5 (2017): 433–44.
65 George Saliba, “Greek Astronomy and the Medieval Arabic Tradition,”
American Scientist 90, no. 4 (2002): 360–67.
66 John B. West, “Ibn al-Nafis, the Pulmonary Circulation, and the Islamic
Golden Age,” Journal of Applied Physiology 105 (2008): 1877–80.
67 Harun b. Kücük, Early Enlightenment in Istanbul (PhD Dissertation. San
Diego: University of California, 2012); Harun B. Kücük, “Early Modern
Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework,” Journal of Early Modern
History 21, no. 5 (2017): 407–19.
19

nature with which contemporary sociology describes the complexity
and social contingency of modernity. This can be seen in the discursive
complexity of ‘Islamic sciences’ during the Golden Age, with a pluralityof scholars engaged in discussions about a broad range of theological,
philosophical, political, educational, and scientific questions. Centre
stage, however, was precisely the competition between revealed andscientific knowledge that characterised Ghazali’s treatises. Zooming in to
the micro level, then, we can discern the tension between religious belief
and philosophical knowledge in Ghazali’s argumentation, a conflict thatparallels discussions in European Scholasticism, with each claiming real
truth for their worlds of thought.68 In Deliverance from Error, I observe
Ghazali engaging with boundary demarcations between religion andscience. In his search for truth, Ghazali describes the world from a religious
point of view, opposing the increasing separation of the logic of scientificenquiry from religious belief, which was evident in the argumentationof other scholars.69 Putting it in Luhmann’s terms, Ghazali observed theworld as the environment of religion, set against burgeoning non-religious
subsystems.70 In this sense, one could interpret his autobiography as anempirical confirmation of Luhmann’s heuristic point of departure: theassumption that religion is, historically speaking, the first social realm thatdifferentiated itself as a functional system.71
The analysis of Ghazali’s argumentation reminds me of Max
Weber’s metaphor of the modern “polytheism” of value spheres in his
Zwischenbetrachtungen. In this seminal text, Weber juxtaposed religious
ethics with the autonomous ethics of the artistic, economic, erotic,
political, and scientific realms.72 On the macro level, these different value
spheres appear as self-referential social systems, each following its own
specific operational codes. On the micro level, however, individual actors

68 Schneider, “Religion und funktionale Differenzierung,” 193.
69 See: Jim Al-Khalil, The House of Wisdom (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2011), 184.
70 Cf. Luhmann, Religion, 282.
71 Schneider, “Religion und funktionale Differenzierung,” 205. I am not reallyconvinced of this point, and mention it here only as a heuristic perspective inthe context of my own observations.
72 Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtungen: Theorien der Stufen und Richtungenreligiöser Weltablehnung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I(Tübingen: Mohr, 1988 [1915]): 582–613.
20

have to struggle with all these impersonal, formally rationalised forces ofmodernity, that all seek to “gain power over their lives.”73 In conducting
their everyday lives, individuals must relate to these spheres of “a sociality
without actors.”74 In Ghazali’s work, we already can see this struggle ofthe individual against such a formal rationalisation of different spheres oflife. It was the associated loss of any valid justification for general moral
standards that this process entailed, and therewith the fear of a rising social
anomie that, centuries later, were the defining features of modern culture
for the conservative thinker Alasdair MacIntyre.75
6 Conclusions: Lessons to Learn from Luhmann and Ghazali

In this essay, I constructed an encounter between the thoughts of the Muslim
theologian and philosopher Hamid Abu al-Ghazali and the Modern Systems
Theory of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Almost a millennium divides
the lives of these two scholars, but it seems that we can bring them intoa kind of dialogue with each other. As mentioned in the introduction, inconstructing this diachronic encounter across cultures, my aim was not tomake a contribution to the body of scholarship on Ghazali’s life and work,
but instead to suggest theory-driven answers to some of the questions thatare at the heart of the CASHSS Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West,
Beyond Modernities’ research programme. Ghazali’s autobiographical noteson the crisis in his personal life serve as an example of pre-modern and nonWestern boundary demarcations between religion and science, illustrating
forms of both, secularity before modernity and secularity beyond the West.
This paper conducts an anachronistic analysis, using Luhmann’s theory, ofthese boundary demarcations, in which Ghazali’s life and work are used as
an example of social boundary negotiations becoming visible on the microlevel. In putting the case of Ghazali into the context of the so-called Golden
Age of Islamic sciences, I have interpreted his writings as an intrinsic part of
the global emergence of the functional systems of science and religion. Thisemergence is epitomised in his search for ‘real truth,’ in the context of the73 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, editedby H. H. Gerth, and C. Wight Mills (London: Routledge, 1992, [1917]), 129–56.
74 Schimanck, Differenzierung und Identität, 48.
75 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth,1981), 58.
21

scientific enquiries of his times. In Abbasid Baghdad, a complex networkof scholars engaged in this search for truth. Their struggle to determine thereal sources of truth reflected a dynamic process of differentiation between
revealed and scientific knowledge, woven into the political and social
conflicts of their time.
In political terms, the life of Ghazali was accompanied by the declineof the classical Islamic empires and their claim to representing a politicaland religious unity through the institution of the Caliphate. Being close toboth the Caliph and the Sultan, Ghazali observed the increasing separation
between religious and political authority in the Abbasid Empire. While theposition of the Caliph was gradually reduced to the representation of thecommunity of believers (umma), the Sultan epitomised worldly power withhis control of the means of physical force.76 In recognising this, Ghazali
probably followed his political mentor Nizam al-Mulk, who wrote a bookon governance in which he defined politics as the worldly maintenance ofstate power and social order.77 In the political philosophy of his time, thistheory of ‘Sunni Realism’ reflected upon the conflict-ridden process of premodern state formation. According to Hamid Enayat, this form of rule wascharacterised by unconditional obedience to the Sultan, a kind of politicalquietism that gradually found its religious justification in the doctrines ofSunni orthodoxy. Political power was in the hands of those who were able
to guarantee internal and external security by military means.78 Hamid
Abu al-Ghazali was one of the thinkers articulating the emergence of a
relatively autonomous political sphere. He argued that the Caliph had defacto lost his political authority. In fact, Ghazali saw him as being entirelyin the hands of the Seljuq Sultan, who only formally paid homage to theAbbasid Caliph.79
In retrospect, I consider these boundary negotiations in the late Abbasid
Empire an example of non-European “preadaptive advances” in modernity,
76 Ulrich Haarmann, “Der arabische Osten im späten Mittelalter 1250–1517,” in
Die Geschichte der arabischen Welt, ed. Ulrich Haarmann (München: C. H.
Beck, 1987), 219.
77 Tilman Nagel, “Das Kalifat der Abbasiden,” in Die Geschichte der arabischen
Welt, ed. Ulrich Haarmann (München: C. H. Beck, 1987), 158.
78 Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (London: Macmillan Press,
1982), 27–29.
79 Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, 11.
22which Luhmann considered necessary for the emergence of new forms offunctionally defined modern realms of communication.80 The scholars in
Baghdad discussed “culturally and symbolically as well as institutionallyanchored forms and arrangements of differentiation between religion andother social spheres.”81 While the rise of a relatively autonomous sphereof politics formed part of these discussions, the search for knowledge
and truth – that is to say the boundary demarcation between science andreligion – appears to be the prime issue at hand. For several centuries,
Baghdad was centre stage for such negotiations between Islam and science.
Against this background, my example of Hamid Abu al-Ghazali inspires
a number of possible strategies for investigating secularities both beyond
and within the West. I would like to conclude by highlighting some ofthese, with the caveat that they currently form mere suggestions, rather
than being elaborated evidence.
First of all, my essay suggests dispensing with the exclusivity of focusing
on the separation between religion and politics. For decades, the social
sciences have almost been obsessed with this particular differentiation
when discussing secularisation. For too long, the separation between
religion and politics has been considered the litmus test for entering themodern world, and, as a result, studies on religion and politics have drawn
scholarly resources at the expense of the exploration of the relationshipbetween religion and any other non-religious realms (of which there are
many!). Here, the concept of Multiple Secularities, with its more general
conceptualisation of religion and the secular, together with an approachthat combines Modern Systems Theory with the paradigm of emergence,
may help in the effort to move away from this rather myopic ‘political’
understanding of modernisation cum secularisation. This particularly
applies to the desire to search for pre-modern forms of secularities,82 or,in Luhmann’s conceptual language, for preadaptive modern advances.
Moreover, applying elements of Modern Systems Theory to the metatheoretical context of emergence can contribute to the avoidance of certain

80 Luhmann, Wissenschaft, 709.
81 Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward
a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no.
6 (2012): 881.
82 Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Preliminary findings,” 3.
23

“anachronisms with functional differentiation.”83 As emergent patterns,
preadaptive advances of modern forms of communication are not in andof themselves modernity per se.
Understanding the social realm through the prisms of social emergencecan also offer solutions to some of the questions raised by Florian Zemmin.
In his working paper, Zemmin points to different critiques of the conceptsof secularity and its plural, secularities. In the latter case, he deals withaccusations of “cultural relativism,” and in the former, he addresses thosethat suppose a non-western pre-secular “wholesomeness” that was undone
by the influence of “western” secularism.84 Translated into questions about
the relationship between unity and diversity, theories of emergence help toprovide answers with respect to two different levels of social reality or levelsof analysis. The level of modern structures may provide us with a certain
unity, while the engagement with and enactment of these structures bysocial actors leads to historically observable ‘cultural’ diversity. Both levels
are intrinsic parts of society, though are also theoretically disentangled,
and can be the subject of simultaneous observations through different
conceptual languages and analytic frames of references. In addition, thesearch for emerging patterns of modernity as preadaptive advances may
indicate the first steps to answering Zemmin’s questions of the why and the
how of extending secularity beyond the West.85
Finally, this essay and its theoretical perspective raise a rather ‘heretical’question: Does the binary conceptual distinction between religion and nonreligion even makes sense at all? The centre’s directors Christoph Kleine andMonika Wohlrab-Sahr point out that this distinction is “the constitutive
core element of secularity” as a concept.86 At the same time, they pose thequestion as to whether the secular can be determined in a positive way.87
To a certain extent, the binary nature of the concepts is flawed, as they are
not of the same analytic quality. In comparison to religion, secularity is – at83 Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, 16.
84 Florian Zemmin, “How (Not) to Take ‘Secularity’ Beyond the Modern West:
Reflections from Islamic Sociology,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS
“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 9, Leipzig
University, 2019, 4.
85 Zemmin, 5.
86 Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Preliminary Findings,” 21.
87 Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, 24.
24

least from the perspective of Modern Systems Theory – nothing more than aresidual category, lumping together everything non-religious. I have alreadycriticised the use of this residual category to turn the distinction between
religion and non-religion into one between religion and politics or religion
and the modern state. By defining the secular as the negation of religion,
however, we ascribe a primacy to the perspective of religion, and to religious
communication as a conceptual domain. Yet, in making conceptual sense of
the secular in a positive way, we end up with a multiplicity of possible seculardomains, such as the arts, economics, the media, law, politics, and science.
These domains all follow their own respective communicational logics, justas religion does. This problem was already visible in Max Weber’s discussionof modern polytheism, in which he also juxtaposed different social sphereswith religion. Why should we privilege the communicative logic of religion
as a functional system, over those of the many other communicative systems
of modern society? Are not distinctions between the logics of economics
and politics, or between science and the arts, equally significant for our
understanding of the modern world? Why should we claim ‘wholeness’
for religion and ‘diversity’ for the secular? Does such a stance still makeconceptual sense, or should we instead entirely drop the concept of thesecular as a residual category? Why should we continue to observe the worldfrom a religious position?

25

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