In his new book, Abdullahi an-Na`im argues that Muslims need a secular state to live their religious lives. Alongside his…
Islam and authority
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Varieties of anti-religious imagination
The publication of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has fostered an exceptionally vibrant intellectual debate on secularism and on the…
A man with a mission
Abdullahi An-Na'im is a man with a mission. As the expatriate Sudanese law professor told The New Yorker writer George…
The butterfly’s unconscious
Youth Without Youth takes us through a strange loop that demands us both cognitively and visually to ask similar questions…
An Islamic case for a secular state
If the state is going to enforce any principle from Islamic sources, according to Abdullahi An-Na‘im, then it should implement…
Misrepresenting Islam
Suggestions that Presidential candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim seemed to have subsided when his controversial pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright,…
A secular state must deliver
It is hard to disagree with the main arguments of Abdullahi an-Na'im's impeccable book: a healthy religious life requires a…
Liberating shari’a
Sometimes, context is everything. For much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1920s in Egypt and the 1900s…
Islamic politics and human rights
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im's expressed goal in Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a is to convince Muslims…
Disentangling Islam and the post-colonial state
The separation---and combination---of religion and state have created almost as many configurations as there are states in the world today.…