The Immanent Frame has a series of interesting posts about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a, all well worth reading. Daniel Philpott:
An-Na`im’s gigantic lifelong task has been to develop an Islamic
basis for human rights and constitutional government, including
religious freedom and full equality of citizenship for Muslims and
non-Muslims and for men and women. He offers his latest book, Islam and the Secular State, as the culmination of this work. Here, he defends a “secular state” that is based on these values and where sharia
is not the basis of constitutional law. He makes clear that he is not
arguing for the exclusion of religion from politics. Muslims remain
free to argue for policies based on their convictions about sharia,
but they ought to do so on the basis of secular “civic” reasons and
within the framework of a constitutional order based on human rights.
Secular, for him, does not mean hostile to religion but rather a
differentiation between religion and state. In fact, he seeks an Islamic
justification for the secular state. It is the high quality of his
pursuit of such a justification over the course of his career that
makes him a giant.His work has long followed the lead of his mentor and inspiration,
the Sudanese intellectual Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who sought to
reinterpret the Quran so as to ground human rights and equality. Like
Taha, An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed
over the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed
sanctions aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination
of women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This
history cannot be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the
Quran, which includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant,
Mecca period of Mohammed’s life, as well as those from the later Medina
portion, marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina
version that had become orthodoxy by the 10th century. But
it is the verses from the earlier period that represent the true,
universal message of Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an
adaptation to particular historical circumstances in the life of the
embryonic umma. An “Islamic Reformation,” to borrow from the title of An-Na`im’s previous prominent work,
would retrieve the Meccan verses for politics today, making them the
ground for human rights, equality, and the rule of law. In the spirit
of Taha, whose teachings led to his martyrdom at the hands of the
Sudanese state in 1985, An-Na`im has courageously taken his arguments
for Islam and human rights all over the Muslim world.
