Secularisation through Legal
Modernisation in the MENA-RegionSaïd Amir Arjomand

As the theory of multiple modernities began to question the uniform
transformation and conversion of all modern societies,1 several culturally specific definitions of secularism/laïcité by modernising elites
were already prevalent in different nation states in the non-Westernworld. Although the Turkish constitution of 1928 was the first to set
up a secular state and to explicitly define laïcité, as Talal Asad andothers have noted, de facto secularisation in the form of control anddefinition of religion by the state had already been ongoing for the
better part of a century.2
State-building, Constitutionalism and de facto Secularisation
Secularisation occurred in both the Middle East and North Africa,
and was the inevitable result of state-building. We should note, however, that this secularisation was de facto and never de jure. The defacto secularisation in question acknowledged the distinction of thereligious and political domains without any explicit delimitation ofreligion or any hint of the disestablishment of the official religion
while shifting control of the administration of law and control of the
judiciary from the religious to the political domain – that is fromreligious courts to the state. In fact, separating religion and the state
or interfering with religion and the Islamic doctrine was far from theintention of the bureaucratic reformers of the third quarter of the
19th century who were responsible for the reception of modern constitutionalism in the Muslim world. On the contrary, they attempted
1
2

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities(Leiden: Brill, 2003).
Talal Asad, Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt (Leiden: International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, 2001); Talal Asad, Formationsof the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003).
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1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

Modern constitutionalism presented ascompatible with andlegitimised by Islam

Islamic law (shari‘a) imposed a limitation upon
autocratic monarchy

Constitutional government: pristine but forgotten form of Islamic
government

to present modern constitutionalism as fully compatible with and legitimised by Islam. Early Muslim constitutionalism was represented
in the writings of a group of Islamic modernists among the reformist
bureaucrats, notably Khayr al-Din Pasha in Tunis and Namık Kemal
in Istanbul, who participated in the drafting of the Tunisian constitution of 1861 and the Ottoman constitution of 1876. These early constitutionalists argued that representative, constitutional government
captured the spirit of Islam. This argument was also forcefully madeby the Iranian consul in Tbilisi, Yusof Khān Mustashār al-Dawla,
in his short tract Yak kalama (“One Word”), published in 1871, but
without any particularly Shi‘ite inflection.3 In this period, Ahmad
b. Abi Diyāf, another Tunisian bureaucrat involved in drafting theTunisian constitution, based his constitutionalist reading of Islamic
history on his remarkable intuition that Islamic law (shariʻa) imposed a limitation upon autocratic monarchy, or in his words, that“monarchy limited by law” (qānun) was indeed the normative formof government in Islam after the pristine Caliphate. This normative
form was violated in some historical periods but was restored by thegreat Ottoman dynasty.4 Similar assertions were made by proponentsof constitutionalism in Iran three decades later. One Iranian pamphleteer asserted that constitutional government had been foundedby the Prophet Muhammad and was first demanded from the rulersof Europe by returning crusaders who had discovered it as the secretof the Muslims’ success. Similarly, a leading journalist in Iran claimed
constitutional government to be the pristine form of government inIslam that had subsequently been forgotten by Muslims.5
This early constitutionalism, which could be considered implicitly Islamic or proto-Islamic, found its major embodiment in the Ottoman Fundamental Law (kānun-e esāsi) promulgated on December
23, 1876. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, the Suzerain of the Bey of Tunis,
who had moved to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul to serve the Ottoman Sultan, was among those who drafted the Ottoman constitution.
3
4
5

2

Saïd Amir Arjomand, “The 1906–07 Iranian Constitution and Constitutional
Debate on Islam,” Journal of Persianate Studies 5, no. 2 (2012).
Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf, Consult Them in the Matter. A Nineteenth-Century Islamic
Argument for Constitutional Government (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 2005), esp. 75.
Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Islamic Constitutionalism,” Annual Review of Law andSocial Science 3 (2007).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

This constitution was fully compatible with Islam as institutionalisedin the Ottoman empire, incorporating both the notion of sovereignty(saltanat) and shariʻa-kānun dualism. It declared the person of the
Sultan as the sovereign and head of state to be sacrosanct and not
answerable to parliament, and it entrusted the Sultan with “the enforcement of the ordinances of shari‘a and state law (kānun)”. The
Islamic features of this 19th-century constitutionalism, derived fromthe Sunni tradition, were championed by the Ottoman Sultan who
also claimed to be the Caliph of all Muslims.
The explicit assumption of the legal modernisation entailed
by state-building at the end of the 19th century, was the “translatability of the Islamic jurisprudence into legislation”. No secularity was
thereby intended. Around the turn of the century, the codificationsof the shari‘a as a civil code by Muhammad Qadri Pasha – endorsedby the reformist Chief Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905)– followed the example and the legal methodology of the Ottoman
Mecelle, the first shari‘a-based modern code of law. The process culminated in the construction of the Egyptian Civil Code of 1948 under the direction of ‘Abd al-Razzāq Ahmad al-Sanhuri, which recognizised Islamic jurisprudence as a residual source of law6 and became
the model for other independent Arab states, though not for Tunisia
which was still under French rule.
Legal Modernisation in IranThe secularisation involved in the legal modernisation was evenmore de facto and unacknowledged in Iran. The peculiarity of Iranas the only Muslim country where Shi‘ite Islam was the establishedreligion consisted in a firmly institutionalised clericalism based on
the popular recognition with the high-ranking clerical jurists (mojtaheds) as the “Deputies of the Hidden Imam” who had their religious
courts independently of the state. This peculiarity left an indelible
mark on the character of Islamic constitutionalism in general as it
developed in the 20th century.
The pervasive assertion of the identity of constitutionalism andIslam often involved crude and misleading reductionism. The conflation of the two was seriously aggravated by a double entendre with6

Ottoman Constitutionof 1876: Sultan shallenforce ordinances ofshari‘a and state law

Ottoman Mecelle: firstshari‘a-based modern
code of law

Model character of theEgyptian Civil Code of
1948

Iranian peculiarity: religious courts with clerical jurists independentlyof the state

Enid Hill, Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press,
1987).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

Confusion on the
double meaning of
milla: religious community and nation

Iranian Supplementary
Fundamental Law of1907: shari‘a limits government and legislation

Iranian Civil Code of1939 conform with
Shi‘ite law

Far-reaching de facto
secularisation by judicial
reform in the
1920s and 1930s

4

the traditional and modern meanings of milla as “religious community”, and as the “nation”. This double meaning made the leaders of
the Shiʻa appear to be the leaders of the Iranian nation as well. It
caused, however, very serious confusion as a given expression, forexample, “rights of the mellat/melli rights”, could be read as national[i.e. constitutional] rights by the one side and religious rights [i.e. as
specified by the shariʻa] by the other, and unintentionally inscribed
the religious leaders into the constitutionalist movement and theconstitutional order.
The Iranian Supplementary Fundamental Law of 1907 introduced
a distinctive feature not present in Ottoman (Sunni) constitutionalism and derived from the far greater differentiation of religious andpolitical authority in Shiʻite Islam. The law placed shariʻa(t) in theconstitution as a limitation to government and legislation. Constitutional monarchy was thus to prevail in the political domain but its
legislation by the representatives of the people could not infringe on
the religious sphere and the sacred law. Neither in the Ottoman nor
in the Iranian case, however, was there any presumption that shariʻashould be the basis of the constitution itself.
In Iran, the codification of civil law was done in the drafting committees of the Ministry of Justice in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The active participation of clerical jurists in codification was a very
effective way of assuring the substantive conformity of the most important corpus of Iranian law, the Civil Code of 1939, with Shi‘ite law.
It may come as a surprise to the reader that implementation of the Islamic penal code at the judge’s discretion had remained theoreticallypossible, though it was never carried out in practice by the lay judgesof the Pahlavi era. Despite the absence of any explicit commitment
to secularism, however, the judicial reforms of the 1920s and 1930s
resulted in the far-reaching de facto secularisation of Iranian law. Religious courts of the mojtaheds were closed, and the law was appliedby secular judges with law degrees from European universities andincreasingly, as time went on, from the newly established Universityof Tehran.
Due to continuity in the judiciary organisation after the fall ofmonarchy, the secularity of administration of law by state courts persisted. It is perhaps surprising to note that Shi‘ite jurisprudence continues to occupy a residual place in the legal order of the Islamic Re-

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – SaïSaïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

public of Iran.7 This is partly because the Shi‘ite jurists of the first twophases of legal modernisation had already Islamicised much of modern Iranian law in substance while secularising the judiciary process
and the administration of justice.8 But there is also a more paradoxical explanation. The attempt to require legislation to comply with
Shi‘ite jurisprudence in the first decade after the Islamic Revolutionof 1979 created a constitutional crisis that was resolved by Khomeiniwith the establishment of an Expediency (maslahat) Council in 1988
that was empowered to overrule the provisions of Shi‘ite jurisprudence on grounds of expediency of public interest (maslahat).9
De jure Secularisation in Turkey and Tunisia
Only in the cases of state-building in the Turkish Republic and in
Tunisia after its independence in 1955 do we find de facto secularisation of the law accompanied by state secularism de jure. Like
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first President of independent Tunisia,
Habib Bourghiba, was a staunch secularist moderniser. In the year
after independence, 1956, his reformist Chief Mufti, Muhammad
Fadhel Ben Achour (Fādil b. ‘Āshur) (d. 1971) produced the Tunisian Code of Personal Status (ahwāl al-shakhsiyya), which removed
many of the shari‘a restrictions regarding women. In contrast to
the Turkish Family Law of 1927, which was simply an adaptation of
the Swiss law, the Tunisian Code of Personal Status was reconciledwith the shari‘a sources with much greater latitude than had been
given by the disciples of Muhammad ‘Abduh in Egypt. It became aprime example for Islamic modernists elsewhere of de facto secularisation in the sense of the state control and definition of religion,
just as Talal Asad defines secularisation. More importantly, it was amajor step in substantive secularisation by releasing family law andthe status of women from the jurisdiction of the shari‘a: polygamy
789

Tunisian Code of
Personal Status: major
step in substantive
secularisationSaïd Amir Arjomand, “Shari’a and Constitution in Iran: A Historical Perspective,”in Shari’a. Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context, ed. Abbas Amanat and Frank
Griffel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Saïd Amir Arjomand, “The Shi‘ite Jurists and Iranian Law and Constitutional
Order in the Twentieth Century,” in The Rule of Law, Islam and Constitutional
Politics in Egypt and Iran, ed. Saïd Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2013).
Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Dual Leadership and Constitutional Developments after
Khomeini,” chap. 2 in After Khomeini. Iran under His Successors (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
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was outlawed, as was divorce by repudiation; women were given
the rights to work and to participate in the public sphere without
spousal consent; and – in later amendments – were allowed also tomarry foreigners while their Tunisian citizenship was extended tothe offspring of such marriage.10

Syrian constitution of1950: Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) the main
source of legislation

Ideological constitutionmaking in the Muslim
world after 1979

6

Shari‘a as the or a Main Source of Legislation?
As previously noted, the 1906–07 Iranian constitution had settled theissue of shari‘a in relation to state law by making it a limitation to
government and legislation. There was no presumption that shariʻashould be the basis of the constitution itself. This very presumption
emerged and spread in the second half of the 20th century. In November 1949, the founder of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood Mustafa
al-Sibā’i was elected to the Syrian Constituent Assembly, which wasto write a constitution for the newly independent Syrian nation state.
As a member of the drafting committee, al-Sibā’i passed an article
declaring Islam the state religion (din al-dawla). The article had to bewithdrawn in the face of fierce opposition from Christians and secularists. However, it was replaced by another article requiring Islamas the religion of the President of the Republic while declaring“Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) the main source of legislation”. Although al-Sibā’i claimed that this made the Syrian constitution of1950 “a model constitution for a Muslim state”, its implications were
far from clear at the time, and the Syrian League of ʻUlama in fact
rejected it.11 Whether inadvertently or by design, the article makes
shariʻa no longer a limitation to legislation but its source.
Far more influential than the short-lived 1950 Syrian constitution
was the declaration of God’s sovereignty in the so-called Objectives
Resolution included in the 1956 constitution of the Islamic Republicof Pakistan. This declaration became the cornerstone for the construction of an ideological constitution purporting to be based on the
Qur’an and Islamic shari‘a. It ushered in a wave of ideological constitution-making in the Muslim world and most notably in Iran after
the Islamic Revolution of 1979, where Islam increasingly appeared
10 Lilia Labidi, “Tunisian Women in the ‘Arab Spring’: The Singularity of Article 46
in the 2014 Constitution,” Al-Raida Journal, Issue 143–44 (2013–14).
11 Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to
Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 174–75.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

as the basis of the constitution and the state rather than a limitation
to them.
The Syrian 1950 Constitution nevertheless grafted a novel ideological element destined to become a staple in Islamic constitutionmaking – namely, the declaration of shari‘a as the main source oflegislation. The Kuwaiti constitution of 1962 (the country’s second)
adopted much of the Ottoman constitution of 1876, but it also elaborated the formula of the 1950 Syrian constitution by declaring theprinciples of shari‘a “a main source of legislation” (Article 2). Egypt
eagerly followed this method of incorporating Islam as the allegedbasis of legislation in Muslim authoritarian regimes,12 and made it
Article 2 of its constitution of 1971, thus adding Islam to the syncretic socialist-liberal-nationalist ideological foundations. In 1980,
the Egyptian government once more pre-emptively amended thesame Article 2, changing “a” to “the” to read in translation: “the principles of Islamic shari‘a are the chief source of legislation (mabādial-shari‘a al-islamiyya al-masdar al-ra’si li’l-tashri‘).”13
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran rejected the characteristically Shi‘ite distinction of the religious and political spheres in
the 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its 1989
amendments, by subjugating the Iranian state and its modernised
constitutional order on the basis of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s
theory of the Mandate of the Jurist (velāyat-e faqih) on rule, just as
the Ottoman Sultan had done as the Caliph – amounted to the Sunnitisation of Shi‘ism.14 The 1979 Constitution also went much further
than the Shi‘ite jurists of the 1930s in the substantive Islamicisationof Iranian law by repealing the last Shah’s family law, which had beenenacted after the Civil Code and was at odds with the provisions of
Shi‘ite jurisprudence, and by introducing the penal code of shari‘a(hodud and diyāt), which had been in abeyance for centuries, as statutory law. The defence of the traditional Shi‘ite distinction of religion

Islamic Revolution of
1979: Sunnitisation ofShi‘ism

12 The word for “legislation” itself is derived from shari‘a in Arabic, unlike the
Persian word which stems from qānun.
13 Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), 30, 56, 82–84.
14 Important aspects of this Sunnitisation are the justification of the Supreme Jurists’orders as “governmental ordinances” (ahkām-e holkumati) and the adoption of
the Sunni principle of maslaha[t] (expediency of public interest) for the creationof the Expediency Council. See Arjomand, After Khomeini.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

Defence of the Shi‘ite
distinction of religion
and politics by dissidents

2014 Constitution of
Tunisia does not evenmention shari‘a8from the political domain was left to the increasingly vocal dissidents, both clerical and lay.15
Constitutional Developments after the Arab Spring
The diametrically opposite constitutional development took place
after the Arab revolution of 2011 in Tunisia. The Islamic Annahda
under the effective leadership of Rachid Ghannouchi did not seek
to revoke the Code of Personal Status, and in fact agreed to a generous quota of one third of the seats of the Constituent Assembly being reserved for women. It is interesting that it was Yadh Ben Achour(‘Iyād b. ‘Āshur), son of the former Chief Mufti, who contributed tothe secularisation and the Islamist discourse during the 2011 revolution by dropping the requirement to have shari‘a as a source oflaw and playing a major role in bringing about the historic powersharing compromise between Annahda and the second- and third-largest political parties represented in the Constituent Assembly as they
sought to create a new constitution based on democratic consensus.16
He had been a judge of the Constitutional Court of Tunisia, set up in
2002, and became President of the Higher Political Reform Commission of Tunisia when it was set up in March 2011, shortly after the revolution. The Commission passed the electoral law on parity between
women and men by requiring alternation between men and women on
electoral lists – an unprecedented move in the Arab world.17 As such,
Yadh Ben Achour was one of the key architects of the 2014 Constitution of Tunisia. To achieve consensus, the Annahda government agreed
not to mention shari‘a at all. The formula of making shari‘a “a” or “the”
source of legislation was abandoned (after having been proposed) by
the Annahda government during the post-2011 constitutional negotiations in order to produce a consensus constitution. In the end, the15 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship,” inCompanion to the Study of Secularity, ed. HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities” (Leipzig University, 2019). www.multiplesecularities.de/publications/companion/css_ arjomand_persianatekingship.pdf.
16 Jean-Pierre Filiu, “The First Year of the Tunisian Revolution,” in The Arab
Revolution of 2011. A Comparative Perspective, ed. Saïd Amir Arjomand (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2014).
17 Lilia Labidi, “The Arab Uprising in Tunisia: Parity, Elections, and the Struggle for
Women’s Rights,” in The Arab Springs. Catalysts, Dymanics and Trajectories, ed.
Fahed Al-Sumait, Nele Lenze, and Michael C. Hudson (Lanham: Rowman andLittlefield, 2015), 181.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

constitution of 2014 made no reference whatsoever to shariʿa. There
was however a last-minute insertion into Article 106, which prohibited
partisan instrumentalisation of religion and committed the state “toprotect the sacred and prevent it from being attacked.”
Conclusion
Let me conclude by returning to the culturally specific patterns ofmultiple secularities as an important component of the idea of multiple modernities. The distinctiveness of the Islamicate pattern of secularity in the Middle East and North Africa is due to the centrality ofIslamic law at the core of the religious sphere. Within this Islamicate
frame, we can explain and contrast the developmental paths of secularisation in Iran and Tunisia.
Islamic law is far more central to the religious domain than theology in the Islamicate civilisation. Correct observation of ritual andpractical rules matters much more than the profession of specificbeliefs and doctrinal tenets, and one speaks of pious behaviour as
orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. As orthopraxy is compliance withshari‘a, the primary measure of secularisation is the shrinkage of theareas of life regulated by shari‘a. Family law and the legal status of
women were among the most important substantive areas of social
life traditionally covered by shari‘a. An important measure of secularisation in Tunisia thus resulted from the removal of traditional Islamic jurisprudence from the regulation of the status of women withthe 1956 Tunisian Code of Personal Status that has remained in force.
Electoral and other laws after 2011 have further enhanced the statusof women independent of shari‘a, culminating in Article 146 of the2014 Constitution that commited the state to protect “the achieved
rights of women” and “to achieve parity between women and men inelected bodies.” The Tunisian state took the first step toward fulfilling
this commitment by acceding fully to CEDAW and lifting its previous(shari‘a-derived) reservations in April 2014.18 In post-revolutionary
Iran, by contrast, we find considerable de-secularisation as a result of
the establishment of a Shi‘ite theocratic republic after 1979, though
this is de facto somewhat offset by a similar shrinkage of shari‘a as aresult of electoral and other statutory laws in the Islamic Republic

Primary measure of
secularisation: shrinkage of the areas of life
regulated by shari‘aTunisia: legal enhancement of women’s rights
independent of shari‘a

Iran: considerable
de-secularisation

18 Labidi, “Tunisian Women,” 77–78.
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De facto secularisationof Islamic law bycodification of law

10

and, interestingly, also by some of the statutory enactments of the
Expediency Council such as the introduction of alimony and theappointment of women as theoretically subordinate judges in family
courts, which are not provided for in Shi‘ite jurisprudence.19
A final comment may also be in order on the distinction I have madebetween de facto secularisation and secularism de jure. The codificationof law – that is, the conversion of Islamic jurisprudence into statutory
law enforced by the state in the 19th century involved far-reaching secularisation without any substantive or de jure secularisation of law. Shari‘aceased to function as what Weber called a “jurists’ law” interpreted byclerical judges and was codified as state law, or law of the land, to be
applied by judges of the ministries of justice modelled on the European
system of civil law with little or no leeway for interpretation by judges asin the old Muslim system or for that matter in the common law systemsof England and the United States. The judiciary became an organ of thestate and was transferred from the religious sphere into that of state administration and was as such secularised de facto.
The nostalgia for a lost golden age caused by the shrinkage ofshari‘a from the modernised legal sphere in the 20th century in the
Muslim world generally goes a long way to explaining the emergence,in the 1970s, of the Islamist ideological notion of the Islamic State
whose primary function was allegedly the execution of shari‘a. The
Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran to realise this utopian notion of
the Islamic state resulted in the creation of a theocratic republic andthus the abrogation of the traditional Shi‘ite distinction of the political and the religious spheres and their historical de-differentiation.
The Tunisian revolution of 2011, by contrast, did not alter the trend
toward progressive secularisation set in motion by the Tunisian constitution of 1861, but instead reinforced it. This contrast notwithstanding, in Iran too the process of de facto secularisation, set in motion by the judiciary reforms which converted Shi‘ite jurisprudence
into state law, has continued despite the Islamic revolutionary hiatus.
This process is somewhat comparable to that seen in Tunisia.
19 Alimony is justified as compensation for past unpaid labour. The verdicts ofthe female subordinate judges are countersigned by a male judge not involvedin the particular case. Justification on the grounds of maslahat or public interest
was added as a new principle to Shi‘ite jurisprudence by Imam Khomeini andendorsed in constitutional law.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

Quoted and further Reading

Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Islamic Constitutionalism.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 115–40.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Shari‘a and Constitution in Iran: A Historical Perspective.”
In Shari’a. Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context. Edited by Abbas Amanat
and Frank Griffel, 156–64. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Dual Leadership and Constitutional Developments after
Khomeini.” Chap. 2 in After Khomeini. Iran under His Successors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “The 1906–07 Iranian Constitution and Constitutional Debate on Islam.” Journal of Persianate Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 152–74.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “The Shi‘ite Jurists and Iranian Law and Constitutional Order in the Twentieth Century.” In The Rule of Law, Islam and Constitutional
Politics in Egypt and Iran. Edited by Saïd Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown,
15–56. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Persianate Islam and the Secularity of Kingship.” In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019. www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion/css_ arjomand_persianatekingship.pdf.
Asad, Talal. Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt. Leiden: International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, 2001.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003.
Brown, Nathan J. Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World. Arab Basic Laws andthe Prospects for Accountable Government. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 2 vols.
Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Filiu, Jean-Pierre. “The First Year of the Tunisian Revolution.” In The Arab Revolution of 2011. A Comparative Perspective. Edited by Saïd Amir Arjomand,
167–86. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.
Hill, Enid. Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law. The place and significance of Islamic law
in the life and work of ʻAbd al-Razzaq Ahmad al-Sanhuri, Egyptian jurist andscholar, 1895–1971. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1987.
Ibn Abi Diyaf, Ahmad. Consult Them in the Matter. A Nineteenth-Century Islamic
Argument for Constitutional Government. Translated by L. Carl Brown. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005.
Labidi, Lilia. “Tunisian Women in the ‘Arab Spring’: The Singularity of Article 46 in
the 2014 Constitution.” Al-Raida Journal, Issue 143–44 (2013–14): 55–82.
Labidi, Lilia. “The Arab Uprising in Tunisia: Parity, Elections, and the Struggle for
Women’s Rights.” In The Arab Springs. Catalysts, Dymanics and Trajectories.
Edited by Fahed Al-Sumait, Nele Lenze, and Michael C. Hudson, 175–208. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.
Pierret, Thomas. Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Secularisation through Legal Modernisation

Th is text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. Th e intent of the Companion is to give scholars interested in the concept of Multiple Secularities, who are
not themselves specialists in particular (historical) regions, an insight into diff erent
regions in which formations of secularity can be observed, as well as into the key
concepts and notions with respect to the study of secularity.
It is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple
Secularities − Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. For as long as the HCAS
continues to exist, the Companion will be published and further expanded on the
HCAS’ website. Towards the end of Multiple Secularities project, all entries will
be systematised and edited in order to transform the Companion into a completed
Open Access publication.
Please cite as:
Arjomand, Saïd Amir. “Secularisation through Legal Modernisation in the MENARegion.” In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019.
www.multiple-secularities.de/media/css_arjomand_legal-modernisation.pdf

12Leipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion