Secularism, Secularity andIslamic Reformism
Florian Zemmin

If we consider Islamic Reformism, it becomes very clear why it is important to distinguish between secularism and secularity as the Multiple
Secularities approach does. ‘Secularity’ denotes a situation in which
religious and secular aspects are distinguished, both in terms of structural differentiations and in terms of conceptual distinctions. ‘Secularism’, by contrast, refers to the political demand for greater separation
between religion and the secular. Islamic reformists have rejected secularism almost unanimously as an external political regime that evolvedin Christian Europe and is alien to Islam. However, they have been
operating with the conceptual distinction between religion and thesecular. They have elaborated this distinction firmly within an Islamicframework to the extent that, in a sense, Islam itself has taken the placeof ‘secularity’, as will be shown.
While this paper focusses on modern Islamic Reformism, towhich the questions of secularism and secularity became central, it
is worth mentioning earlier reformist thoughts and movements. For
centuries, Muslim scholars have repeatedly called for reform (iṣlāḥ)and renewal (tajdīd).1 Since Islam claims its origin in revelation,
renewal here is not meant in the sense of innovation, but rather in thesense of restoring the original intention. Scholarly reconsiderations
have intersected with various popular reform movements, most visibly pietist and puritanical ones.2 What the great variety of pre-modern
12Secularism andsecularity

Pre-modern
reformist thoughts andmovements

John O. Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islah,” inVoices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York/Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983).
See, for example: Madeline C. Zilfi, “The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45, no. 4 (1986); Albrecht
Hofheinz, “The Islamic Eighteenth Century: A View from the Edge,” in Islam in derModerne, Moderne im Islam: Eine Festschrift für Reinhard Schulze zum 65. Geburtstag,ed. Florian Zemmin, Johannes Stephan, and Monica Corrado (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
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1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

Modernity, Islam,and Europe

The conventional
typology of intellectual
trendsreformist thinkers and movements had in common was that they
were not centrally concerned with an external other of Islam, which
was to become Europe. It is for this reason that Ahmad Dallal entitled his recent book on pre-modern Islamic reformist thoughts andmovements “Islam without Europe”.3
In modernity, references to and creative appropriations of European ideas and concepts are characteristic not only of Islamic Reformism, but of Islamic intellectual trends in general. Much scholarshipon Islamic history was produced under the assumption that modernity had evolved in Europe only and was then exported to the Islamic
world, which had allegedly previously been in decline. Some eventhought they could date the onset of modernity in the Islamic world
to the landing of Napoleon near Alexandria on 1 July 1798. Both theIslamic and the European elements of this oversimplified view havebeen disproved. Numerous studies have established intellectual andsocio-political changes that dismantled the proposed paradigm ofIslamic decline. Equally, scholars have increasingly highlighted theentangled history of modernity and the contributions to modernity
made by non-Europeans, challenging the view that modernity originated in Europe alone. Today, the condition and understanding ofmodernity is most adequately viewed as emerging from the colonial
encounter itself.4 This implies that European hegemony is part ofmodernity, but that the hegemonic European variety of modernity
itself has an entangled genealogy and is but one particular variationof more common conditions.
That being said, the conventional typology that distinguishes between three modern Islamic intellectual trends is still made on thebasis of the intellectuals’ differing positions on European modernity.
According to this typology, traditionalists want to retain their Islamic
tradition as it had been, without engaging with modernity; westernised Muslims think that the European way is the only possible realisation of modernity and ought to be followed; and Islamic reformists
want to critically select aspects from European modernity and at thesame time reform Islam in order to harmonise it with modernity.
3
42

Ahmad Dallal, Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century
Islamic Thought (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
See: Dror Ze’evi, “Back to Napoleon? Thoughts on the Beginning of the Modern
Era in the Middle East,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (2004).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

While this typology provides an initial ideal-typical orientation
in a complex intellectual landscape, it has two major problems: firstly,
it is formulated from the perspective of the reformists, who appear
as the sensitive middle path between two extremes; secondly, andmore fundamentally, it identifies tradition with Islam and religion,and contrasts it with modernity, which is identified with Europe andsecularity.5
Since modernity is a common condition that was epitomised by
Europe, but shared more widely, Islamic positions are better understood not via their overt relation to Europe, but rather via their conception of the relation between religion and society. After all, thenegotiation of this relation has been at the centre of different conceptions of modernity, in both Europe and the Islamic world. Secular
actors posited that modernity could be grounded in society alone,since humans are by nature rational social beings. From this perspective, religion is either considered to be obsolete or validated as culture. Religious actors, in turn, argue that society, which was first perceived as secular from their perspective, is not sustainable without
being based on religion. Whether this religious argument is regarded
as a mere reaction to dominant secular actors or whether the latter issaid to have emerged from transformations in the theological field,
depends on the narrative of modernity one wants to tell – as originating as a counterpoint to or from within religion. What matters isthat in modernity, non-religious and religious actors both are concerned with the issue of societal order and hence also share in secularpremises and arguments, which they either regard as immanently
self-sufficient or as in need of being grounded in transcendence.
The integration of a religious perspective on society and a societal
perspective on religion is, in fact, constitutive for Islamic reformists.
Islamic reformists strongly rejected claims that secular society was
self-sufficient and asserted that society needed religion. This religion
that society was in need of was, notably, a religion to be transformed
according to the demands of society. In this integrated perspective,
Islamic reformists mirrored religious actors in European societies.
Take, for example, the following statement by the German Rabbi
5

Problems with theconventional typology

A more systematic
typology

Islamic reformists:
integrating society
and religion

For a critical discussion of this conventional typology, see: Florian Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Tradition. The Concept of ‘Society’ in the Journal al-Manar (Cairo, 1898–1940) (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 155–60.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Saïd Amir Ajormand: Persianate Islam and the Secularity of KingshipProtagonists ofIslamic Reformism

Ludwig Phillipson from 1855: “Religion has so long abandoned society, that it is scarcely a matter of surprise if society has in its turnabandoned religion. The two thus parted must be reunited.”6 For
Islamic reformists, the desired unification of religion and society was
possible only based on Islam, which according to them was the only
truly modern religion, perfectly fulfilling the demands of society andconforming to universal reason and progress.
The representatives of Islamic Reformism on whom we shall focus here are those long identified as its most influential protagonists.
Whether under the name of reformism, modernism, or salafiyya,7almost every textbook on modern Islamic trends, names the following three individuals as foremost representatives of the intellectual
trend under consideration here: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838/39–
1897), his disciple Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) and ʿAbduh’s
pupil Rashid Rida (1865–1935). Two qualifications should bemade regarding the identification of this famous triad with Islamic
Reformism: First, there were, of course, other influential protagonistsof Islamic modernism, such as the Indian intellectual Sayyid Ahmad
Khan, who was attacked by al-Afghani for his pro-British attitudes
and his alleged materialism.8 Secondly, al-Afghani, ʿAbduh, and Ridadiffered in their views, foci, and strategies. This is concealed by theteacher-student relationship, which too narrowly focuses on personal lineages and ignores changing social, political, and cultural conditions. In addition, the thought of ʿAbduh in particular has beentaken up by a great variety of intellectuals, some of whom have been
overtly at odds with Rida, who to some extent distorted ʿAbduh’s
legacy in order to portray himself as ʿAbduh’s most faithful follower.9
6

7
8
9

4

Ludwig Philippso[n], The Development of the Religious Idea in Judaism, Christianity and Mahomedanism, considered in twelve lectures on the history and purportof Judaism, delivered in Magdeburg, 1847, by Dr. Ludwig Philippsohn; translated
from the German with notes by Anna Maria Goldsmid (London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, 1855), ix.
On the genealogy of the term salafiyya and the (non-)usability of Salafism as ananalytical category, see: Henry Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reformin the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
See: Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious
Writings of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn “al-Afghānī” (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983).
Mohamed Haddad, “Les Œuvres de ‘Abduh: Histoire d’une manipulation,” Institut
de Belles Lettres Arabes 60, no. 180 (1997).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

With these qualifications in mind, I shall focus here on the journal
al-Manar (Cairo, 1898–1940) as the mouthpiece of Islamic Reformism. Al-Manar was founded by Rida with substantial support from
ʿAbduh and inspired by al-Afghani’s and ʿAbduh’s journal al-ʿUrwa
al-Wuthqa (Paris, 1884). Such a focus is needed to account for thesocio-political circumstances of intellectual production and to avoid
making sweeping generalisations.
Focussing on al-Manar is a rather obvious choice since this tremendously prominent, widely connected, and influential journal
illustrates wider issues and trends in the Islamic negotiation of themodern socio-political order, including the questions of secularismand secularity. Al-Manar was published in Cairo but was read far
beyond Egypt, and also included articles and letters by readers from
India, Russia, China, France, Syria, Indonesia, England, Turkey
and Brazil, among other countries. The wide reception of al-Manar
during its life-span is well-documented, and its influence lingers tothis day. In 1998, on the centenary of the foundation of al-Manar,al-Manar al-Jadid (The New Manar) was launched. Tellingly, thisnew journal opened with Rashid Rida’s editorial from the first volume of al-Manar, reprinted in 1909. It is evident that the topics andtropes negotiated by al-Manar in the formative phase of modernity
continue to linger and inform Islamic debates about reform and modernity today.10
When al-Manar was founded in Cairo in 1898, Cairo’s print media
was booming. Print media was dominated by rather secular journals
and newspapers that were edited by Syro-Lebanese journalists witha Christian background. The centre of Arabic publishing had moved
from Beirut to Cairo with these journalists in the 1880s. Whereas
private publishing had been virtually non-existent in Egypt in 1870,
849 newspapers and journals were founded in Arabic alone between
1876 and 1914.11 Al-Manar was not the first ‘Islamic journal’ (majalla islāmiyya), but it quickly established itself as the most prominent one. Being an ‘Islamic journal’ did not mean it was restricted

Al-Manar: the mouthpiece of Islamic
Reformism

Egypt’s secular publicsphere10 For the prominence and reception of al-Manar, see: Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Tradition, 151–64.
11 Ami Ayalon, “The Press and Publishing,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam;vol 6: Muslims and Modernity; Culture and Society since 1800, ed. Robert W. Hefner(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 579.
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5Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

Commonalities between
intellectuals

ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq: thefirst Islamic secularist?

6

to religious topics, but that it addressed questions of public concern
from an Islamic perspective and from within the Islamic discursive
tradition. This was also a question of marketing and of catering for acertain readership. In the age of print capitalism, al-Manar competedwith other publications for shares of the reading public. Differences and rivalries were not only due to marketing considerations, theyalso related to political positions, ideological convictions, and cultural affiliations. It was especially in debates about the appropriate
foundations and structure of the socio-political order that al-Manar’s
Islamic voice competed with nationalist, socialist and other voices in
the public sphere.
Despite the overt rivalry between journalists and intellectuals ofdifferent backgrounds, these urban literati had much in common.
After all, they were members of an elitist intelligentsia, who considered themselves capable of mastering the modern world, of guiding
the people and of transforming society. Many of them also knew eachother. Rashid Rida was acquainted with and cooperated with several
Christian intellectuals of a more overtly secular leaning.12 Rida, themodern Islamic intellectual, shared many secular premises and arguments with more overtly secular intellectuals with a Christianbackground. However, he and other Islamic reformists conceived of
secularity within an Islamic framework rather than a non-religious
one, which proved to be more difficult. They grounded secularity
in transcendence and attacked overt claims of the secular being selfsufficient, or of either religion or society being truly sustainable outside of an Islamic frame connecting both spheres.
Rida was thus a vocal critic of the Azhari scholar ʿAli ʿAbd alRaziq, whose 1925 book Islam and the Foundations of Power isconventionally considered the first Islamic argument for secularism in Arabic.13 In this book, ʿAbd al-Raziq argues that the prophet
Muhammad brought a religious message only and acted as a worldly
leader only as a means of protecting that message. ʿAbd al-Raziq
claimed that Muslims were free to choose the form of government
12 Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Tradition, 132ff.
13 ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq, al-Islam wa-Usul al-Hukm: Bahth fi al-Khilafa wa-l-Hukuma
fi al-Islam (Cairo: Matbaʿat Misr, 1925); ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq, L’Islam et les fondements du pouvoir; trans. Abdou Filali-Ansary (Paris/Cairo: Éditions La Découverte/
CEDEJ, 1994); Souad T. Ali, A Religion, Not a State: Ali ʿAbd al-Raziq’s Islamic Justification of Political Secularism (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2009).

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformismthat best suited their interests, since the central sources of Islam, theQurʾan and the Sunna, did not contain prescriptions as to the formof government and there had never been a consensus (ijmāʿ) among
Islamic scholars. ʿAbd al-Raziq suggested that the only suitable formof government for the time was a democratic, parliamentarian one.
Upon the publication of his book, ʿAbd al-Raziq was stripped of his
office as a sharīʿa judge by al-Azhar. Rida, who in 1922 had authoreda book on the necessity of the caliphate,14 criticised ʿAbd al-Raziq
almost to the point of pronouncing him an unbeliever.15
In view of this fact, it is interesting that twenty years earlier, Rida’s
close collaborator and friend, Rafiq al-ʿAzm, had made the same basic argument for the separation of religion and politics in Rida’s very
own journal al-Manar.16 In addressing the then ubiquitous questionof why Islamic countries were lagging behind European nations,which were considered to exemplify civilisation and progress, alʿAzm identified the “mixing of politics with religion” (mazj al-siyāsabi-l-dīn) as the central cause. He attributed this to the fatal influenceof practices of the primitive Arab Bedouins, which lingered on, eventhough the prophet Muhammad had demanded the separation of religious and worldly affairs. Al-ʿAzm maintained that the early Islamic
conquests led by the prophet were not religious, but purely politicalin nature. He also argued that since the Islamic sources were silent
on the matter of politics, Muslims were free to choose their form ofgovernment, and that a democratic form of government would beappropriate.
Al-ʿAzm’s views were criticised in al-Manar by the Indian Muslim Salih bin ʿAli al-Yafiʿi, who argued that the Islamic sources were
not silent at all on the matter of politics, and that the weakness ofMuslims was not due to the mixing of politics with religion, but
due to politics having been disconnected from religion, which had

Rafiq al-ʿAzm: an
unexpected flirt withsecularism

The limits of Islamic
publics

14 Rashid Rida, al-Khilafa aw al-Imama al-ʿUzma: Mabahith Sharʿiyya Siyasiyya Ijtimaʿiyya Islahiyya (Cairo: Matbaʿat al-Manar, 1922); Henri Laoust, Le Califat dansla doctrine de Rašīd Riḍā. Traduction annotée d’al-Ḫilāfa au al-Imāma al-ʿuẓmà (LeCalifat ou l’Imāma supréme) (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1986 [1938]).
15 Most strongly: Rashid Rida, “al-Islam wa-Usul al-Hukm: Bahth fi al-Khilafa
wa-l-Hukuma fi al-Islam bal Daʿwa Jadida ila Nasf Binaʾiha wa-Tadlil Abnaʾiha,”
al-Manar 26, no. 2 (1925).
16 For al-ʿAzm’s argument and his debate with al-Yafiʿi summarised below, see:Zemmin, Modernity in Islamic Tradition, 310–25.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

The secular as selfsufficient or dependent

Secularity in Islamic
Reformism

8

allowed absolutist rulers to gain power. Al-Yafiʿi maintained that
Islam demanded a non-absolutist form of government. Like al-ʿAzm,
al-Yafiʿi seemed to have a consultative, at least somewhat democratic
type of government in mind. Unlike al-ʿAzm, he avoided the termdīmūqrāṭiyya (‘democracy’) and instead adduced the Qurʾanic principle of shūrā (‘consultation’) to legitimise that form of government.
Al-ʿAzm’s overt advocation of secularity on Islamic grounds was ultimately unsuccessful within Islamic Reformism, and al-ʿAzm himself
later validated democracy as essentially Islamic, rather than as commendable on autonomous secular grounds.17
A central issue within Islamic Reformism, evident in the debate
between al-ʿAzm and al-Yafiʿi, is which parts of the secular sphere
are to be granted autonomy. Let us approach this issue in five steps.
First, in Islamic Reformism, principles of modern politics, like a consultative government, can be legitimised as inherently Islamic or as
independent from, but conforming with, Islam. Second, the acceptability of an argument also hinges on the concepts adduced, as thealternatives of dīmūqrāṭiyya and shūrā show. Third, claims of politics
being self-sufficient and not subject to Islamic principles are refutedby the majority of Islamic reformists whose programme includes apolitical dimension. Fourth, Islamic reformists mainly disagree overwhich aspects of Islam belong to the religious and which to the secular sphere and how close the connections between both spheres
ought to be. Fifth, elaborations of an Islamic political order operatewith secular premises. This was also the case in Rida’s conceptionof the caliphate.18 Overall, the dominant reformist argument against
secularity as a self-sufficient, external order and for the connectionof religion and the secular in Islam does not deny the distinction between religion and the secular, but rather integrates this
distinction, and thus secularity, within Islam.
This constellation, which is constitutive of Islamic Reformism, issummarised in a claim that is only seemingly paradoxical, namelythat Islam does not require secularity, because it contains secularity
17 Rafiq al-ʿAzm, “al-Hukuma al-Islamiyya,” al-Manar 26, no. 7 (1926).
18 Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform. The Political and Legal Theories of Muḥammad
ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966),
158–86; Abdulkader Tayob, Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (London: Hurst,2009), 110–11.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

in its very essence. A first articulation of this can be found in a debate between Muhammad ʿAbduh and Farah Antun.19 On the surface, this debate was about the philosopher Ibn Rushd and the role ofreason and science in Islam and Christianity, but the real issue was
the possibility of a civil government. To Antun, this was possible only
based on the emancipation of politics from religion, a process that heargued had happened in the European Enlightenment and to which
Christianity was more susceptible than Islam. ʿAbduh objected thatthe very need for reason to emancipate itself from religion was particular to the Christian religion. Islam, by contrast, accorded reason
its due autonomy and politics in Islam was essentially civil. In short,and to slightly systematise and update ʿAbduh’s wording, Islam does
not require the separation of religion and the secular, because it in its
essence recognises and sustains secularity. This foundational claim
was elaborated more explicitly later, for example, by the contemporary European Islamic reformer Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan shiftedfrom an outright rejection of secularism, and especially the French
laicité, to considering secularity as also being appropriate to the Islamic religion.20 In Muslim publics today, the concept of ʿalmāniyya(‘secularism’, ‘secularity’) mainly functions as “the other side ofIslam”, while at the same time, if not as explicitly, this other side canbe integrated into Islam.21
When conceptualising secularity within Islam, reformists resorted
to several classical distinctions, mainly from the field of jurisprudence. The most significant conceptual distinction in this regard
is that between ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt, between cultic or religious
matters and matters relating to human interactions or secular affairs.
ʿAbduh, then Rida and al-ʿAzm, and, later, Tariq Ramadan used
ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt increasingly systematically to conceptualise
the modern distinction between religion and the secular. Anotherimportant conceptual pair used to distinguish between religion andthe secular is that of dīn and dunyā, which in their Qurʾanic usage referred to the sacral cultic sphere and the social world protecting that

Conceptualisingsecularity in Islam

19 Alexander Flores, “Reform, Islam, Secularism: Farah Antûn and Muhammad Abduh,” in Entre reforme sociale et mouvement national: identité et modernisation en
Egypte (1882-1962), ed. Alain Roussillon (Le Caire: CEDEJ, 1995).
20 Florian Zemmin, “Integrating Islamic Positions into European Public Discourse: The
Paradigmatic Example of Tariq Ramadan,” Journal of Religion in Europe 8, no. 1 (2015).
21 Daniel Kinitz, Die andere Seite des Islam (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
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9Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

Flexible distinctions

Islam as secularity

10

cultic sphere from the profane.22 Al-ʿAzm, for example, distinguishes
firmly between the purely religious section (al-qism al-dīnī al-maḥḍ)of the shariʿa and the purely worldly section (al-qism al-dunyawīal-maḥḍ).23 Other classical Islamic concepts used in modernity to validate the secular sphere and to strengthen the role of reason for discerning human interests in that sphere are the concepts of maṣlaḥa
(common, public interest) and of the maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (the goals of
the sharīʿa).24
The fact that these distinctions are made within Islam has fourmain effects. First, it makes it rather easy for Islamic reformists toshift from a secular to a religious position and back. Second, theconnections between religion and the secular can be continuously
loosened or tightened. Third, the factual secularity of reformist Islam
is often blurred and difficult to perceive from the outside. Fourth,Islamic actors might themselves deny their secularity, which they
associate with the other side of Islam, not dissimilar to many proponents of secularity considering Islam as their other.
It should be clear that it was from a particular secular perspective,
explicitly operating with the concept of secularity, that I have identified the factual secularity of modern Islam. From this perspective,
Islam does not appear to be fully secular, for the distinction between
religion and the secular remains somewhat blurry and has not been
explicated as such. However, if we shift our perspective, the same
holds true the other way round: Islamic reformists can identify secularity as factually Islamic,25 but would insist on it not being fully
22 Reinhard Schulze, “On Relating Religion to Society and Society to Religion,” in Debating Islam. Negotiating Religion, Europe, and the Self, ed. Samuel M. Behloul, Susanne Leuenberger, and Andreas Tunger-Zanetti (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), 346.
23 As pointedly summarised by Rashid Rida in: Salih bin ʿAli al-Yafiʿi, “Shakl Hukumat al-Islam wa-Daʿf al-Muslimin bi-Istibdad al-Hukkam,” al-Manar 7, no. 23(1905): 912.
24 On the modern reconceptualisation of maṣlaḥa and maqāṣid, see: Anver M.
Emon, Islamic Natural Law Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),
esp. 36, 195. On Rida’s usage of maṣlaḥa, see: Dyala Hamzah, “From ʿilm to sihâfaor the Politics of the Public Interest (maslaha): Muhammad Rashid Ridâ and his
Journal al-Manâr,” in The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880-1960): Empire,
Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala Hamzah (London: Routledge, 2013). On contemporary reconceptions of the maqāṣid: Felicitas
Opwis, “New Trends in Islamic Legal theory. Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa as a New Sourceof Law?,” Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017).
25 See also: Shaden M. Tageldin, “Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Sibāʿī, and theTranslations of ‘Religion’ in British Egypt,” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011): 128.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

Islamic, for it has not fully harmonised the relation between religion
and the secular. From a secular perspective, then, Islam can partiallyfunction as secularity, whereas secularity from a modern Islamic perspective can function partially as Islam.
To view Islam and secularity on a par requires a tertium comparationis that is neither Islam, nor secularity. This tertium is the relation between religion and society, as becomes clear when one looks
at the common conditions and reference problems underlying both
Islam and secularity and when one tries to shift perspectives between
overtly secular responses and Islamic responses to that reference
problem. Taking a bird’s-eye-view then, both Islam and secularity are
overarching guiding ideas to elaborate the modern distinction between religion and society.
This basic constellation can of course be elaborated very differently. The distinction-yet-connection of religion and the secular in
Islamic Reformism can give way to ensuring the mutual relation andrelative autonomy of both spheres and thereby mirror the dominantideal-typical arrangement of secularity. It is equally possible, both inIslam as in secularism, that one side denies the autonomy and validity of the other, either subsuming religious aspects under a secular standpoint or secular aspects under the standpoint of religion.
Which of these options becomes hegemonic hinges less on cultural
resources, let alone religious dispositions, and more on socio-politicalcircumstances. Whichever way the distinction-yet-connection ofreligion and the secular in Islam plays out, it should be clear thatit does not express an alleged timeless essence of Islam, as many
modern reformists themselves as well as orientalists claim,26 but isinstead a modern arrangement that mirrors claims to the secularbeing self-sufficient.

Islam and secularity

Commonalities anddifferences

26 Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of
the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield/Oakville: Equinox, 2011).
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11Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

Quoted and Further ReadingʿAbd al-Raziq, ʿAli. al-Islam wa-Usul al-Hukm: Bahth fi al-Khilafa wa-l-Hukuma fi
al-Islam. Cairo: Matbaʿat Misr, 1925.
ʿAbd al-Raziq, ʿAli. L’Islam et les fondements du pouvoir. Translated by Abdou
Filali-Ansary. Paris/Cairo: Éditions La Découverte/CEDEJ, 1994.
al-Yafiʿi, Salih bin ʿAli. “Shakl Hukumat al-Islam wa-Daʿf al-Muslimin bi-Istibdad
al-Hukkam.” al-Manar 7, no. 23 (1905): 899–912.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Florian Zemmin: Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism

This text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. The 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 different
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:
Zemmin, Florian. “Secularism, Secularity and Islamic Reformism.” 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_ zemmin_islamicreformism.pdf

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