Religious Secularity

Abstract

Naser Ghobadzadeh’s Religious Secularity presumes that Muslim thinkers nolonger consider an Islamic state as the desired political system. This aversionto a theocratic state is perhaps felt most by those Iranian reformist thinkerswho have had to operate in such a state since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Theauthor claims that in its place, the Muslim world has devised a new theoreticalcategory called “religious secularity,” which allows for a religiously secularstate to, at least theoretically, present itself as an alternative to an Islamic one.He defines this religiously secular attitude as one that refuses to eliminate religionfrom the political sphere, but simultaneously carves out a space for secularpolitics by narrowly promoting only the institutional separation of religionand state.He claims that this concept has two goals: to (1) restore the clergy’s genuinespiritual aims and reputation and (2) show that Islam is compatible withthe secular democratic state. In Iran, rather than launching overt attacks againstthe theocratic state, this discourse of religious secularity has created a more“gentle, implicit and sectarian manner in challenging the Islamic state.” Unlikein pre-revolutionary times when there were both religious and non-religiousideologies vying for an audience, Ghobadzadeh suggests that in Iran today,“the alternative discourses are religious and concentrate on liberating religiousdiscourse from state intervention.”The author pays homage to Abdullahi An-Na’im and claims to be usingIslam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (2008) as aconceptual framework. As far as subfields within political science go,Ghobadzadeh’s Religious Secularity is also similar in form to NaderHashemi’s Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy (2009) and, as such,can be considered a work of theoretical comparative political science ...