Sometimes, context is everything. For much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1920s in Egypt and the 1900s…
Liberating shari’a
Islam
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…
Misrepresenting Islam
Suggestions that Presidential candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim seemed to have subsided when his controversial pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright,…
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…
Secular imperatives?
Calls for the embrace (or for that matter rejection) of secularism are premised on a putative opposition between secular and…
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…
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…
Islam and authority
In his new book, Abdullahi an-Na`im argues that Muslims need a secular state to live their religious lives. Alongside his…
Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics
Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im's…
Anti-secularist failures
I guess it's to be expected that in today's fashionable anti-secularist perspective an act of secular criticism that calls for…